I am wondering is it possible to change the shape of the Oric's cursor?

I know what, and how to "poke" in order to change the /example/ the appearance of the letter "A",

but is it possible to "poke" in order to change the Oric's cursor from it's basic square-shape into something else?

Example: instead of square-flashing cursor, to have a "lower-line"-flashing cursor? Or any other shape? It could be useful in some games?

Brana

Yes it is possible !
But as far as I remember (so I can be very wrong !), you will not be able to use any shape. The only thing you can do is to setup the "height" of the cursor, thus sticking with a rectangular shape.
With a heigth of 1, for instance, you will get a "lower-line" cursor.
....
(searching data...)
....
found !

Anyway, the Graphic cursor mask resides at address #215, thus an instruction like this :
poke #215,I should do the trick, but I don't know exactly how.

waskol wrote:
Yes it is possible !
But as far as I remember (so I can be very wrong !), you will not be able to use any shape. The only thing you can do is to setup the "height" of the cursor, thus sticking with a rectangular shape.
With a heigth of 1, for instance, you will get a "lower-line" cursor.
....
(searching data...)
....
found !

Anyway, the Graphic cursor mask resides at address #215, thus an instruction like this :
poke #215,I should do the trick, but I don't know exactly how.

RE: If I understood You correctly, then if I would do something like this:

10 FOR A=0 TO 255
20 POKE #215,A
30 WAIT 150
40 NEXT A
50 END

That should “show” me all the possibilities of the cursor’s shape, but – nothing happens; cursor just continues to “blinks” at it’s basic square shape regardless of the value of “A” in the example above.

Well, you can in BASIC, but it's just not trivial.
Basically (haha) you can do that:
* Disable the blinking cursor
* each time you move the cursor, you pick up and save the value which is on screen, and you save it somewhere else.
* you use a special reserved character (for example ASCII code 127) and you redefine it with the same values than you find for the other character you just saved, except that you force the two last lines to some _ pattern
* you poke this special character in the place of the previous one on screen
* when moving again, you replace the saved character on the screen

ok, The Oric cursor is simply the inverse of whatever it is currently over, so if you boot the Atmos, then type D then move cursor back left the D appears as inversed D. There are 3 ways to change the cursor shape..

1) Ensure the cursor lyes over a character that modifies its shape and colour as desired

2) Write a complicated asm routine to redefine one of the existing characters(like code 127) to the current character under the cursor position then use this in place of the cursor in some devious way

3) Take some tipex or a black pen and mask out the parts of the cursor you don't want. it does limit you to keep the cursor in the same place tho

But in essence you cannot change the shape of the cursor since it must be able to travel over any background text attribute without corrupting its effect on the rest of the line.

Also note that disabling the cursor does not remove the inverse property at the cursor location but only serves to not display the cursor there

This can be demonstrated by poking an inverse character into the text line, disabing the cursor then moving it (blind folded) over the inversed character, the inversed character is reset to normal video!